updated 03:43 pm EDT, Fri September 27, 2013

Group seeking new members; Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm not members

Cellphone manufacturers Broadcom, Huawei, Oppo, Samsung Electronics and Spreadtrum today announced the formation of MobileBench, a new industry consortium formed to provide more effective hardware and system-level performance assessment of mobile devices. The consortium will initially focus on addressing the need of developers to better understand every element within the mobile platform and deliver optimal system-level performance to enhance the user experience.

MobileBench will provide mobile platform designers with more useful solutions based on speedy time-to-market analysis, and consumers with more reliable indices for better assessing the user experience. The consortium believes its platform-agnostic tools will be widely adopted by mobile device designers and engineers, to the benefit of OEMs and consumers alike.

The MobileBench Consortium plans to soon introduce two professional engineering tracks: the MobileBench for hardware evaluation, and the MobileBench-UX for testing system-level applications that address UX factors. In the future, the consortium also intends to introduce a test system for consumers to evaluate personal mobile devices on their own.

The consortium's first benchmark tool, MobileBench, is a performance assessment tool that expands mobile testing from simply assessing individual components and other conventional factors to include more sophisticated test focuses such as video and image file viewing, video recording, and other specific mobile modes and services to which users can relate and are used in day to day operation of the phones.

MobileBench consists of a mobile device test suite, including core elements such as application processors, popular memory solutions, embedded storage (eMMC) and graphics memory chips. Besides analyzing these basic test areas, engineers can set up detailed parameters such as repetition and intervals, with each test result being monitored in real-time, allowing usage pattern and system status analyses. MobileBench-UX will be designed for evaluating user-centric functions such as switching among different apps, video shooting and viewing, and phone camera operations.

The consortium's five founding members had its inaugural meeting in Shenzhen earlier today, and claim to be seeking new members. Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Apple are notably absent from the list of attendees, so it remains to be seen if the benchmarking suites will truly be cross-platform.